UoPeople degrees not accepted in Belgium

[SteveFoerster]

First of all, I did not provide any "list of countries". It is an objective fact that the University of the People is not accredited outside the United States. Being "accredited by WASC" is irrelevant and guarantees nothing: the degree is still rejected, because those universities simply do not care about the University of the People, regardless of its accreditation.

Claiming that WASC accreditation is "irrelevant" says a lot more about you than it does about WASC or University of the People. 

Claiming that "UoPeople offers accredited degrees to learners worldwide" is misleading: this online university is not "accredited worldwide".

The degrees are accredited and the learners are worldwide, so the statement is true.

But this makes your later criticism of other people's use of English rather ironic.

And in this specific case, WASC accreditation has not resulted in any improvement over DECT accreditation, as the school's reputation has remained unchanged: namely, very poor.

You're entitled to your opinion, but it doesn't seem to be widely shared. Out of curiosity I searched for their name and reputation and this was the first response:

https://www.top10.com/online-degrees/rev...the-people

And I'm not a big fan of rankings but Webometrics puts them about in the middle of the pack globally speaking, which is decent considering that they're a teaching institution with no research profile.

That doesn't seem "very poor" to me.

The bottom line is that if someone has the choice between University of the People and Harvard, sure, they should choose Harvard. But that's not what University of the People is trying to be: they mean to make no-frills higher education accessible to people on a modest budget. And since we're sharing opinions, in mine they actually do that pretty well.

I also notice that instead of addressing the issue on its merits, you prefer to derail the conversation with rambling responses, personal attacks and by spamming links. In all these weeks, you haven't managed to refute even one of my arguments, and you keep grasping at straws without reaching any conclusion.

Rightfully or wrongfully, people often decide how much weight to place on an argument based on the reputation of the one making it. If you engage in behavior that people see as extreme then that's your choice, but it doesn't help your case.

I agree that the university is not actually run directly from Israel. In fact, administrative emails come either from India or from Africa, and they are often poorly written and full of grammatical errors. One can therefore assume that, although the headquarters are in Israel, very little staff is actually based there, since the majority are located in India and Africa. The choice of India or Africa appears to be driven by cost considerations, given that labor is much cheaper there.

As someone who does business in West Africa I take a dim view of your implication that Africans and Indians are inherently worse at English—and your own misuse of it above doesn't help.

But otherwise, yes, hiring staff in low income countries is a good strategy to keep costs low, and there's nothing wrong with that.

What remains unclear is where the revenue actually ends up. Since the real headquarters are in Israel (and not in the US) it is plausible to assume that the funds may ultimately end up in Israel.

Fortunately, there's no need to assume anything. It's a US-based 501©(3) non-profit organization, which means if you really care about where the money goes you can review their public filings to find out:

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofi.../264078735

Mostly it seems to go to salaries, which is understandable, and by the standards for an institution of their size their executive level compensation is quite modest.

So if you were looking to imply this is some sort of nefarious Israeli slush fund or whatever, I guess you'll just have to be disappointed.